Before the Beginning: Exploring the Eternal Nature of Jesus in Scripture

Genesis opens before there are cities, nations, roads, houses, or even a human being to look toward the heavens.

“And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.”
Genesis 1:2

The Hebrew word used here רָחַף, rāḥaph. It carries the idea of hovering, fluttering, or moving gently over something.

The Spirit of God was not merely present at creation as an observer. There is movement here. Presence. Activity. Something is about to happen.

Then John opens his Gospel with words that deliberately carry us back to Genesis.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
John 1:1

Before Bethlehem, before Nazareth, before Peter ever dropped a fishing net to follow Him, Jesus was there.

That thought changes the way I picture the Gospel accounts.

The same Jesus who stood beside Peter had been present at creation.

Peter could hear His voice. He could watch Him eat. He could walk beside Him on a dusty road. He could sit near Him while they rested.

Yet Peter was sitting beside the One through who creation had come into being.

We experience everything through time. Yesterday is behind us. Tomorrow has not arrived. We live inside a narrow moving point that we call now.

God does not appear to relate to time as we do.

In Isaiah 46:9-10, God speaks of declaring “the end from the beginning.” Isaiah 46:9–10 (KJV)
“Remember the former things of old: for I am God, and there is none else; I am God, and there is none like me,
Declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure.”

In Psalm 90, we are told that from everlasting to everlasting He is God, and that a thousand years in His sight is like yesterday when it has passed.

Psalms 90:2 (KJV) Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.

Psalms 90:4 (KJV) For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night.

Peter later writes:

“With the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.”
2 Peter 3:8

These passages are not trying to give us a scientific explanation of how God experiences time. Human language may not even be capable of fully describing such a thing.

But they do tell us something remarkable.

God is not imprisoned by the clock that governs us.

Then Jesus says something extraordinary.

“Before Abraham was, I AM.”
John 8:58

Not simply, I existed before Abraham.

I AM.

The words pull us outside our comfortable human timeline.

The infant in Bethlehem did not mark the beginning of Jesus.

The carpenter from Nazareth was not merely a man who appeared in history and began there.

Before Abraham, He was.

Before Peter, He was.

Before the first human eyes ever looked toward the heavens, He was.

And when Genesis says, “In the beginning,” we should remember something astonishing:

That was our beginning.

It was not His.

Perhaps that makes the Gospel scenes even more remarkable.

Peter did not fully understand whom he was walking beside.

I doubt any of us truly can.

But imagine sitting beside Jesus beneath a night sky, looking upward at the stars.

Then realizing:

The Man sitting beside you remembers their beginning.